Everyone Is Beautiful Read online

  As the ring came closer, I clasped both hands together and, by some luck that had never been with me before, caught it. I clutched it tight for a minute as Ted Koppel explained that he'd found it on the floor next to the water fountain. He'd stepped on it, actually.

  “I didn't know you were married,” he said.

  “Yep,” I said, popping my ring back into the little groove it had worn into my finger as proof.

  Ted Koppel offered me a ride home, which I refused, and then he seemed to linger a little, as if he were trying to come up with a new topic of conversation. But I was going home. I had my ring, and I was done. I thanked him for finding it, but he shook his head. “Just good luck,” he said.

  On the walk home, I thought about Ted Koppel. He appeared to be a fashion-challenged, authority-bucking, iconoclastic loner with no regard for the meaning of marriage. But part of me liked the fact that he was always checking me out: Even when he wasn't watching me, he was watching me. He was not, on any level, a threat to Peter. I didn't even like him. But I will confess, if you really want to know, that I did like being liked.

  Chapter 18

  The next night, Thursday, I skipped the gym (as I would do all semester) to go to my first photography class. Peter did not seem to notice my willingness to give up the gym on those nights, or contrast it with my flat refusal to sacrifice even five minutes of gym time for him. Or maybe he was just giving me a little breathing room. Either way, I felt grateful to him for letting it lie.

  That night, I raced over to the Extension School lab and was totally out of breath when I walked in late, ready to apologize to the instructor. I had planned it all out: how I would sneak in the back and take notes on everything he or she said and how, at the appropriate moment, I would pull him or her aside to explain my bedtime predicament: that with three little squirmy kids, bedtime took two adults minimum, and I wouldn't be able to leave the house until the bedtime routine was over. I'd be late to every class, and that was that—but my lateness did not reflect my level of enthusiasm. It was an important speech, since I was already desperate to win the approval of my instructor, sight unseen. I'd been planning what I'd say all week.

  But instead, when I walked in, I had to revise my plan. Because the instructor of this class, the person standing at the front of the room, wasn't just a “him” or a “her.” The instructor was, of all possible people in the world, Ted Koppel.

  I froze as soon as I saw him. And he froze, mid-sentence, too. People waited for him to start talking again, which he didn't, and then they started looking back and forth between us. One guy even cleared his throat.

  Finally, Ted Koppel spoke. He said, “Are you going to be late to every class?”

  And I said, “Yes. I am.”

  He'd been introducing himself to the group when I walked in, and it took him a few seconds to pull himself together. But once he revved up again, he really got going. For weeks, all I'd really known about this man at the gym was his penchant for flip-flops and tropical apparel. Now I got specifics—countless details about his life in an avalanche of personal history, starting with his name, which was not, of course, Ted Koppel. It was Nelson Frank. And he was, among other things, a divorcé and former magazine photographer. “I'm ex-paparazzi, too,” he told us on that first night. “I just didn't have the balls for it.”

  “Who did you stalk?” a guy in plaid shorts wanted to know.

  “I was strictly D-list,” Nelson answered. “They had me on the Danny Bonaduce beat.”

  He was recently divorced. Very recently. As in two-weeks-ago recently. Or at least, that's when he ‘d signed the final papers. In class, he wore rumpled corduroy pants and rumpled oxford shirts—and his flip-flops. He told us his wife had ironed for him when they were married, but that he hadn't wanted her to. She had done it because she couldn't stand to see a grown man walking around in wrinkled clothes. But she resented it. Now he was free to wear his clothes the way he liked, but she'd ruined it for him. He couldn't even be himself anymore.

  This was the bulk of his welcome talk.

  “I'm forty-five years old,” he told us, “and I have nothing.”

  Some of the grandmotherly types in the class argued this point, offering encouragement and trying to help him find a bright side.

  “No,” he cut them all off. “I have nothing. But let's talk about photography.”

  We were expected to develop our own film and make our own prints in the darkroom. It was black-and-white photography, and if we wanted lessons on taking pictures of our grandchildren with digital cameras we weren't going to get them with Nelson. Real photography was about finding the extraordinary—in the ordinary or anyplace else. He showed us around the facility. It had a big light table to look at negatives on, some totally dark closets for handling exposed film, and a large darkroom with long sinks in the middle for developing pictures. It was a clean, busy place, and I loved it right away.

  The darkroom had a black cylindrical door to keep the light out. When I stepped in, Nelson stepped in after me. As the door spun around us, he said, “You're the one on scholarship?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw your application. Those were some great paintings.”

  “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  We walked into the darkroom.

  “You don't think they were great?” he asked.

  “I think they never amounted to much,” I said.

  The class was assembling behind us for a lesson on enlargers. He leaned over to me and said in a whisper, “It's nice to see you in something other than workout gear.”

  And I couldn't think of anything to say then, other than, “Thanks.”

  In the darkroom, he talked to us about chemicals and timers and the basics of how to print, and then he told us that his ex-wife had taken his dog when she left. “I found that damn dog,” he said, as we all looked on. “I'm the one who named her.”

  “What's her name?” a bald guy with a thick beard asked.

  “Her name is Babette,” he said. “And she can balance a bottle of San Pellegrino on her nose.”

  Nelson had worked for a variety of local papers before landing this teaching job. He was still freelancing, but this job gave him some security—something his wife had always wanted. Now he had the security, but not the wife. He also had a portrait business, he added, if we knew anybody who needed pictures. Weddings, kids, pets. He did it all.

  We had been instructed to shoot a roll of film before the first class, so I had brought my mom's camera to a photography store on Mass Ave. the week before to ask them how to use it. I bribed my children with lollipops to sit still, while the sales guy, who had numbers tattooed all over his forearms, walked me through the steps. It wasn't too hard. I just had to crank a spool of film about as wide as a lasagna noodle into the body of the camera. Then I had to focus and check the light meter. And then snap.

  Later, at the park, Baby Sam had gnawed on a granola bar while the other two boys built a giant volcano of pebbles and I walked all around taking photos. I discovered a couple of things during that trip to the park: One, I loved taking those photographs. I loved looking through the eye of the lens, scanning for a perfect shape or moment to capture. I loved the idea that the art was already there, and all I had to do was find it. And two, because this camera hung at my belly, because it was so old-timey that people didn't get how it worked—or even know it was a camera—and because the click it made when I snapped the picture was almost imperceptible, I could take pictures without anybody realizing what I was doing. Folks thought I was fiddling with my camera—or possibly my purse—when, in fact, I was focusing, snapping, and moving on to the next target.

  I loved the anonymity of it. I loved moving through all the crazy personal moments happening all around me and recording the most vivid—the baby reaching to be picked up, the mother rubbing her tired eyes, the boy in the plaid shirt with the toy plane. We were supposed to shoot one roll of film for class, but I had shot seven.
r />   Nelson showed us how to develop film that first night, and I developed all my rolls. I felt a crazy urgency about being there. I was not going to waste a single second.

  “I assume you're all here because you're missing something in your lives,” Nelson said to us, as he brought the first class to its close. We were gathered around the light table. “You're hoping I might be able to help you find what you're looking for. Well, let me tell you something. Photography will break your heart. You'll either have no talent for it, which will be awkward and make you feel worthless, or you'll be great at it, which will be worse.” He was moving around us as a group, seeming to think out loud. “But whatever you're looking for,” he continued, “I can guarantee you're not going to find it. Not for three hundred bucks at an extension school. That's not how life works.”

  He started handing out the syllabus and some coupons for his favorite camera shop. Then he pointed at me. “This one here was a painter. But she never made it. If she had, she wouldn't be here.”

  He scratched his forehead. “Here's my advice: Go whole hog. You want to change your life? You want to do something that matters? Something that makes you feel proud? Something that nobody else can do? Then I better not see just two pictures a week, I better see twenty.” He looked around to see that we all had our handouts, which we did. “Now,” he said, heading for the exit, “I'm going home to get drunk.” His flip-flops squeaked on the way out. The door slammed behind him. And we were dismissed.

  “What a jackass,” the bald guy said, as we stood blinking at one another like a herd of cattle. “That guy's a dick.”

  We all nodded, me included. Of course. Of course he was. But I, for one, was going to do whatever he said.

  The second class, I spent the entire time in the darkroom. I cannot describe how thrilling it was to watch the images of the photos appear on the paper as it floated in the chemical baths. And from the very first picture I printed—an image of a little kid about to drop from the monkey bars, taken from below, his arms on either side of his frightened face at one angle and his mother's arms reaching for him at another—I knew that I wanted to be in that darkroom every breathing minute that I could.

  Perhaps it was just the timing. Maybe I was just ready to be consumed by a pursuit of my own. It's possible that if I'd gone back to painting at this exact moment instead of photography, it might have hit me the same way. But that's not the way it happened. I started this class, and before I knew it, I was spending every evening minute that I wasn't at the gym in the darkroom.

  At the park, I took a lot of pictures of Amanda. She loved it when she could pose: She'd kiss at the camera and lean in like Marilyn Monroe. She liked it less well when I followed her for candids. “Now you're being a nuisance,” she'd say, as I snapped pictures of her holding Gracin up to the water fountain.

  “I'm not interested in taking your picture when you're acting beautiful,” I said. “I want to take your picture when you're being beautiful by accident.”

  “Nothing beautiful is an accident,” she said.

  And when I took pictures of Gracin with her legs covered in Band-Aids, Amanda said, “Let me take the Band-Aids off.”

  “It's the Band-Aids that make the picture,” I told her.

  I took photos everywhere. That camera was around my neck at the grocery, around the neighborhood, at the drugstore, and, of course, at the park. The boys wanted to play with it, but I was uncharacteristically stern. I protected it in a way that I had never protected my wallet, or my makeup, or my toothbrush. I told the older boys it was “dangerous” and they must never touch it, and I told Baby Sam that it was “hot.” He was good at hot. We ate hot peas and hot carrots and hot broccoli all the time. He knew what to do with hot, and whenever he was near the camera, he'd blow on it.

  At the darkroom, Nelson developed a tendency to hover behind me while I was printing. “You're the only one in here doing anything interesting,” he whispered over my shoulder while I was working.

  “Okay,” I whispered back.

  And then he started talking to me about the gym. He had joined to get fit and make his ex-wife sorry she left him. His plan was to buff up, and then swing by her new apartment in a tight T-shirt and jeans. “That'll kill her,” he said. “That'll really kill her.”

  On the night of our first critique, three weeks into the class, I had fifteen photographs. Everybody else had two each.

  “Should I put them all up?” I asked Nelson.

  “Hell, yes!” he said, loudly, gesturing at the class. “Show these bozos how it's done.”

  Some things take a long time to learn. Some things, you have to study and work on and tweak and strive for. Most things have been that way for me. Very few things have come easily. Even my paintings had required hours and hours of angst and labor and revision and touch-up. And even when I finished them, I wasn't satisfied.

  But photos came easily. I seemed to have a knack. As fall blew in, I got a library card and started checking out photography books—falling asleep at night with their big spines pressing against my belly. Walker Evans, André Kertész, Diane Arbus. And I fell asleep hard. Because we were up by six with Baby Sam, I was squeezing everything about me into the hours between the boys' bedtime and mine: the gym, the photography class, my weekly plate of chocolate cake. Lots of afternoons with the kids, I'd just lie on the sofa while they sprayed entire cans of whipped cream into the bathtub or colored on the walls in their rooms with markers. What the hell, I figured. Josh could always repaint.

  It was not a perfect situation. I didn't really have the space in my life to cram in a new hobby. But there it was.

  Nelson didn't let us crop our pictures, so, really, there wasn't much to be done with each image. Either it worked or it didn't. I found I got about one picture on each roll of film that was worth printing. And I knew it as soon as I saw the contact sheet. I'd print it, and then move on to the next one in an all-consuming rhythm.

  I wasn't much interested in the technology, or the chemicals, or the math. Some people loved to talk about equipment and lenses and types of film. Guys in the class could stand around the light table for hours, comparing cameras in their collections. I didn't care at all. I just loved the images. I just wanted to see them appear on the paper.

  But maybe that was the difference. The photographs I was taking were like accidents. I wasn't setting up a portrait studio and arranging the lighting just so and tilting people's heads. The pictures I was taking just caught little moments. They were almost like snapshots. And so there was very little to criticize after I developed the film. I hadn't been trying for any particular effect, so every picture that worked was a delightful surprise.

  At home, I started tacking the photos up on the wall in our bedroom.

  “These are better than your paintings,” Peter said.

  “How is that possible?” I demanded. “I've been doing this for three weeks.”

  Peter shrugged. “You've found your thing.” He loved it when answers were simple.

  After that first critique, when my fifteen photographs had taken up half the wall, Nelson handed me a key to the darkroom. He said I was the real thing. “Work as late as you want,” he said. “Just lock up when you go.”

  So I started staying late—sometimes until midnight, or after.

  Nelson would often hang around with me a little after everyone else left, complaining about his ex-wife, who had stolen all his money, and asking me if he should grow a mustache.

  “Nelson,” I said, “I'm working here.”

  “I have her name tattooed on my ass,” he said in response. “Did you know that?”

  But I barely heard him. I was busy. I was in the midst of an artistic awakening that I did not want to waste one second of. I was so consumed by my new hobby, in fact, that I hardly even blinked when Peter told me he won the Hamilton Fellowship. “You're sure you don't mind?” Peter asked again, before he mailed back his acceptance letter. “Three weeks at Christmas is a very long time.�
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  I waved the notion away. “We'll be fine,” I insisted. “You just show those geniuses out in California how it's done.”

  Peter didn't know what to think. “Last summer, you were totally against it.”

  “Last summer, I was less happy.”

  Nora still babysat two nights a week for Peter, and I still went to the gym four—every night that I didn't have class. Peter went to the gym himself and, sweetly, came home and did the dishes before he showered. Things continued much as before. But something had shifted for me.

  For four years, my mind had been entirely on our family—how much everyone had or had not eaten that day, who needed laundry done, who needed a haircut or a diaper change or a Band-Aid. I did all those things that moms do. And I still did them after I started taking photography. But—and this was the difference—I'd added something new to think about. Something just short of thrilling.

  I wanted to take pictures all the time. And the buzz of that desire inside my body woke me up a little. Not just to life, and to art, and to my old sense of self as a person who had things to say about and contribute to the world—but also to Peter. I'd been so jealous of his practicing for so long. I'd felt like I was in competition with his piano for his time. But now, suddenly, I understood how Peter felt. I understood what it was like to be on fire like that. And how that fire lit up everything around you.

  There was a shift between us. I stopped resenting Peter's work. And Peter, suddenly, started missing me.

  “You're always busy,” he said one night, when I was reading in bed.

  “Takes one to know one,” I said.

  “But I'm less busy now,” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Now that I'm not practicing at night when I'm watching the boys.”